


Philia

by Max_Mercury773



Series: Intimacy [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Backstory, Friendship, Missing Scenes, Team Bonding, Thinly Veiled Dumpster Fire Minato
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:07:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25765690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Max_Mercury773/pseuds/Max_Mercury773
Summary: philia (n): friendship or affectionA collection of ficlets centered around Team Minato
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi & Nohara Rin & Uchiha Obito, Namikaze Minato & Team Minato
Series: Intimacy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1869184
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28





	1. Friend

Obito loved colored pencils.

The first thing he bought with his own money had been an egg salad sandwich at the age of eight from the convenience store across the street.

A box of fifty colored pencils had been the second.

At the Academy, map quizzes were handed out at the end of the week are required colored pencils to complete. Mist territories were green. Fire Country were all reds and oranges. Green for Iwa too. All capitals and trade centers were to be circled in black. He never understood why he needed to use more than three colors to complete his quizzes (the 50 colors claim on the box was a flat out lie) but Obito’s classmates went rabid over colored pencils.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t get it because every Friday afternoon Obito picked who to gift his pencils to. A ritual developed over time. A classmate would walk up to him during homeroom and offer food in exchange for access for the day. Obito always agreed because he was never offered a snack he didn’t like. Milk pudding, lemon candy, and wasabi chips. Obito’s map quizzes were almost always returned with a score of sixty at best and _FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS_ scribbled in bright red ink. He wasn’t bothered by it because he’d always have a treat to kickstart the weekend.

Bright smears of light danced across danced on the eyelids like when you stare at a candle for too long. Some of them were shaped like lemon wedges. He pried his eyes open. The sky was the classic cloudless paint-by-numbers blue of spring. Metal squeaked rhythmically behind him, perfectly in time with the pain throbbing against his head.

Sprawled out in the grass like a beached starfish, Obito choked up some laughs and a couple whimpers. He clutched his head where it’d smacked the ground. His foot had caught when he’d tried to backflip off the swings. A wave of bitter saliva filled his mouth.

The urge to puke out of sheer embarrassment crept up on him.

Before he knew it, her nails were digging into his shoulder, one hand on the back of his head as she fussed over him.

She had a cold name.

Nohara Rin.

And while not a total mismatch, Obito thought a name like Haruhi would suit her much better. He blushed at her fussing. Obito lived with his aunt and uncle for as long as he could remember. He’d never been fussed over before.

Rin was the girl who memorized everybody’s birthday and brought sweets for the class. It made June the best month ever because five people had June birthdays. She didn’t know it, but he’d liked her since before they’d been assigned to a team together. And not the ordinary, “oh, you’re fun to throw spitballs at” kind of like either.

Obito _like_ -liked Rin.

Chakra prickled his scalp like a hundred tiny needles, as if instead of an arm or a leg his entire head had fallen asleep. His pain faded. She sat him up. There was a dandelion tucked behind her ear, the same shade of violet as the markings on her face.

“Are you okay? Does it hurt anywhere else? Should I go find a teacher?”

He wanted to say something cool, pretend like he’d flubbed the backflip on purpose. Cross-legged and knees bouncing with anticipation, Obito looked into her big brown eyes asked if she liked penguins instead.

She blinked.

“What’s a penguin?”

Rin not knowing what a penguin was cut down her coolness points, but not by much. She did just fix his head, after all. He jumped to his feet, the change in his pocket jingling. Obito strode past her and plopped himself down on the middle swing.

He declared with gusto, “Fluffy snowbirds! I mean, they’re only fluffy when they’re little, kinda like baby seals. They look like walking cotton balls, but they can hold their breath underwater for like half an hour.”

“Awesome,” she chirped, sitting in the swing next to him. She kicked out her feet, leaned all the way back. “Are penguins your favorite animal?”

Any cool points she’d lost were quickly recovered, because Rin let him tell her everything he knew about penguins. He smiled big, showing off the gap where he’d lost his last two baby teeth. 

Obito had just gotten into rambling about the ferocity of his second favorite animal – the mighty hippopotamus – when he discovered she liked lizards.

They gave him the creeps, but Rin really _really_ liked lizards. She liked them more than kittens, liked them a hundred times more than puppies, and would have had an army of them if she could’ve. Her parents only let her have two. Something called an axolotl and a blue skink named Go.

“I like Emperor penguins a lot, yeah. The library on Geranium Street has, like, twelve books about them. They live in the Land of Snow so that’s why we don’t see any here.”

Rin nodded and swung way up high, to the point he thought she might fly over top the tree branch it was attached to. She slipped out of her seat and into a backflip. When she landed, hands outstretched like an award-winning gymnast, she said, “I hope we get a mission and meet, like, _fifty_ penguins.”

Obito had _like_ liked Rin since she handed him strawberry mochi on his birthday. He hated strawberry flavor foods and mochi too. Anything sweeter than an apple, really. But he loved that she knew his birthday and looked him in the eye when she congratulated him on it. She’d been his crush ever since.

Rin became his friend after spending a whole afternoon practicing backflips and arguing if an armored penguin with a katana and laser eyes could be Hokage.

When Rin’s birthday came around, he left a box of a hundred colored pencils on her desk.


	2. Team

Kakashi scribbled everything he hated about his new team in a little black book he kept hidden under his pillow.

His mother had called it “catharsis” when she’d done it. Kakashi had snuck a glance inside during dinner one day when she’d gotten up to grab chili oil to pour over her rice. He recognized a few clan names – Sarutobi, Uchiha, Shimura, Inuzuka – and a list of words he wasn’t allowed to say. Unlike his mother, Kakashi took the time to encrypt his notes. Anyone who couldn’t name at least a hundred dog breeds would never crack it.

He found it weird which details he remembered about his mother. Kakashi had to fight for the important memories and he thanked the gods for the picture on the altar to remind him what she looked like.

Scarfing down his breakfast, he explained five different ways to his dad that he knew where he was going and didn’t need to be walked to training. Gathering up his tools, he raced out the door to training ground 3-B picking egg out of his teeth.

Kakashi’s complaints about his sensei could be boiled down to teaching style. Minato-sensei made everything into a game. The Monday routine went; two hours of shogi, an hour of clone tag, hide n’ seek break, and two hours of sparring before lunch. A little childish for a future S-Class shinobi if you asked him.

Uchiha Obito ate up four pages, mostly about his stupid face and his stupid voice and stupid smile. His most recent gripe was that he breathed too loudly. Kakashi fantasized punching him in the face daily.

He had five pages of notes, theories, and grievances dedicated to the puzzle box known as Nohara Rin. A month away from certification, Rin would be the one and only field ready medic among their friends. Her and Obito’s friends though, not his.

Kakashi didn’t have friends.

He had ninken.

Having finished second in her class, he’d expected someone more impressive.

Sadly, no such luck.

Prim and proper, Rin didn’t have a single ounce of bite to her. She never argued. She never complained. She never annoyed Minato-sensei like he and Obito did. She gave everybody sweets on their birthdays back in the Academy. Obito stuck to her like moss on a log. Her parents were happy-go-lucky civilians. Unassuming and inoffensive, she smelled too sweet, like fake flowers, and spoke too soft. Nohara Rin, _the perfect little kunoichi_.

Kakashi roamed the training ground until he found his team and they began warmups. Six hours later, he raced up the stairs to his room, shouted hello to his dad, and whipped out his little black book. He ripped out three of Rin’s five pages and tossed them in the trash.

Giggles bubbled up again as he flopped face first into his pillow. He kicked his feet in glee. In the middle of a Minato-sensei vs. Everyone game of capture the flag, Kakashi had discovered Rin had a comically extreme fear of dogs. They lost the game, of course, because it went against Minato’s personal belief system to just let them win.

But they also lost because while Rin was shrieking in terror and Obito running around like a chicken with its head cut off, Kakashi had collapsed in a fit of laughter. He’d heard of people being afraid of dogs just like he’d heard of the boogeyman. He never imagined they really existed. Clearly Rin wasn’t as perfect as he’d thought.

Anyone who screamed at the sight of Pakkun had issues.


	3. Image

Rin idolized few people, if any.

No matter how much she wheedled and begged, Kakashi refused to spill who he looked up to.

She’d try to catch him off guard and ask after lengthy sparring matches. The three of them, cooling off under the shade of a weeping willow tree. He never fell for it though. Never gave an inch as to his interests or what he liked to do with his free time. Talking about things like that weren’t, as he put it, “conducive to a shinobi lifestyle”. She wondered which _Think Like a Shinobi_ self-help book he picked that up from.

Rin suspected he wasn't the type waste time wanting to be like anyone other than himself. Although, only Kakashi would consider admiration a waste of time.

It was weird – he was weird. A small, wiry boy, two years her younger, who looked to be in constant need of a hug.

Obito looked up to war heroes.

Allegiances and nationalities meant squat to him, so long as they were powerful. He’d drop dead before he ever mentioned it to Kakashi, but Obito was fashioning his shinobi career after the late, great White Fang.

She loved them, but Rin didn’t aspire to be like her parents.

Hers was a shinobi family.

Kids from founding families begged to differ because to them, to be a shinobi was to fight. Retirees and desk workers still wore their headbands, but they weren’t _real_ shinobi. They couldn’t go on missions. If the village were attacked, they couldn’t defend it. So why should they be allowed to call themselves shinobi if, when push comes to shove, they’d take shelter with the civilians in a crisis? It was an argument her classmates liked to peddle whenever Rin insisted her parents were shinobi.

Her mom pushed papers for T&I and her dad worked long hours in the forge, crafting blades for ANBU.

“A picture of mediocrity,” Ise-chan had mumbled at lunch one autumn day over a bowl of noodles. “What,” she’d asked, shocked at Rin’s having taken offense. “It’s what my mom says.”

A spoke in the faceless wheel that kept the village running strong.

That was her family’s position.

It was a realization she’d come to by the time she turned eight.

Because her mother had shattered her pelvis in the middle of the swamps of Water Country and survived five days without receiving medical attention, she was less than.

Because her father chose his wife over his job and settled on creating blades instead of wielding them, he was less than.

Because Rin didn’t have a name that struck fear into the hearts of the enemy, she was less than.

It was a realization which made shame bubble up in her stomach every time she assured her father that he didn’t need to cheer her on at sparring practices. Or when she memorized three routes to the Academy, making friends with Aburame who was as boring as the bugs he fostered and Aki-chan who she couldn’t stand, just to avoid her mother’s offer to walk her to school.

It was shameful.

It was wrong.

But Rin wouldn’t be able to stand it if she ended up like her parents.

The perfect kunoichi – that’s what she’d be.

Then May came around and Ise-chan started bringing her brand-new radio to the Academy. Her classmates rioted. They crowded around Ise and her little red radio, ignoring the teacher, shoving each other and calling dibs on playing music. Nara and Yamanaka got into a fist fight over it, though Rin suspected there was more to the story than a dumb dibs violation.

As the weeks wore on, the novelty wore off and Rin got her day with the radio.

After a string of folk tunes, Rin flipped to a station in the middle of an interview. She recognized the name of the village’s pride and joy, Namikaze Minato. He had strolled into her father’s workshop to commission a set of specialized kunai some time ago. Months later, her father had yet to quit bragging.

Curiosity piqued, she listened and soon discovered he was everything she wanted to be.

In the span of fifteen minutes, Rin found her hero.

She bought magazines his research was featured in with her allowance and kept them in a stack by her bed.

She heard from Aki that he’d done a brief internship at Konoha General Hospital and begged her mother for anatomy textbooks.

She met a nurse, Uchiha Mikoto, willing to mentor her.

And whenever she hit a wall in her studies, Rin would recall how the interviewer’s voice crackled over the speakers.

“With a pedigree like yours, it’s a miracle you’re so powerful! How’d you do it? No bloodline to speak of and – forgive me if I’m wrong – but your parents were civilians, were they not?”

“You’re correct,” he’d calmly replied. “My father was a fisherman, my mother a seamstress. They were Konoha. Isn’t that enough?”

A year before he was assigned to be her sensei, Rin came face to face with her hero, the man who inspired her to be a medic. It was a chilly spring morning. Rin was running errands for her mother. Instantly recognizable with his dandelion haircut, he had the beginnings of a goatee around his mouth.

She caught him smoking beside a dumpster with a bottle of liquor in his lap. Namikaze Minato, high as a kite, told her in a conspirator’s whisper that he’d seen a kappa in kabuki makeup skulk by an hour ago.

Rin promptly burst into tears.


	4. Birthday

“I’ve got cake.”

He had made the cards himself.

A line of balloons cut from colored construction paper had been glued to the card’s interior with curly green streamers taped to the ends of them to look like strings.

Obito had spent a whole day and half a stack of invitations working out a way to get the twine to do what he wanted. The idea was that when you opened the card, the twine would pull, and the recipient would be greeted with a pop-up pennant banner which read YOU’RE INVITED. At the bottom left-hand corner, Obito had written in his best penmanship the time, date, his address, and “To Obito’s Thirteenth Birthday Party”. He had figured it was high time he quit wishing for someone to throw him a surprise birthday party and just do it himself. If he arranged everything himself then nothing could go wrong.

He could make and decorate everything with his own special Obito flair.

He made only two cards.

After putting the finishing touches on the second, slipping it into an envelope addressed to Hatake Kakashi, Obito got to thinking. Half his problems stemmed from thinking too much but alone in his apartment with only his plants to bounce ideas off of he couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t like he couldn’t invite more people. Genma never passed up an opportunity to party. Gai was too nice to say no to his face.

If just one person showed up, he’d be happy. It’d be a lame party with just one attendee, but at least he could say he had had one. But what about the Uchiha? What about his aunts and uncles? They usually turned up on his birthday. What if one of them knocked on the door while he had Rin or Kakashi over? What would he do then? He would have to answer the door.

With all those questions bouncing around his head hard enough to give him a headache, Obito came to his senses. He trashed both the invitations. He tore them up in a fit of embarrassment and went about the rest of the day as if he’d never made them. The day of his thirteenth birthday, Obito planned to sit alone in the dark and eat chocolate ice cream while watching reruns of _The Adventures of a White Yaksha_.

He baked himself a cake.

The morning of his birthday, he attended morning training and gave it twice as much effort. Before Rin could wave goodbye and before whatever stealth gods Kakashi prayed to could whisk him away, Obito took a calculated risk. Chest heaving from the taijutsu drills, he sprung it on them while they rested in the shade of a willow tree.

“I’ve got cake,” he said.

Kakashi looked up from polishing his knives.

Rin waited for a follow up, playing with the frays in her socks.

“It’s my birthday and I wanted cake, but all the supermarkets near my apartment sell little ones, I mean like teeny tiny cakes you could swallow whole. I’m thirteen so I wanted to go all out, eating cake for a week, so I made my own and now I’ve got too much cake.”

“What flavor?”

“Matcha and chocolate.”

On the way to his apartment, Rin gave him the gift she’d been hiding all morning.

Kakashi munched on pineapple slices while he chatted with Rin and ended up puking in his ficus.

There wasn’t so much as a card in the mail from his relatives. Obito pretended it didn’t sting and added his thirteenth birthday to a list he kept in a locked drawer titled “Best Days”.


	5. Tag

Rin strategized like her life depended on it because one day, she’d be on a mission with more than just herself to worry about. She figured practicing getting herself sorted out quickly and quietly would serve her well in the future. She put a hand to her chest Fisting the material, she took deep breaths and calmed her hammering heart.

A zigzagging web of wires tagged with paper bombs trapped Kakashi as if he were a treasure that had to be either protected or destroyed. She’d gotten a glimpse of the tags before hiding in the underbrush. The sealing calligraphy differed from the ones used in real combat and even from the training bombs that spat out smoke when activated, though she couldn’t make sense of the squiggles. Rin would play it as safe as possible. Minato had tagged Kakashi near the start of the exercise then transported him inside the wire trap, leaving herself and Obito to fend for themselves. The two of them had been working nonstop for the past half hour to get him free.

Five wires formed Kakashi’s makeshift prison. Obito had been given pick of training grounds this time and had chosen 3-A. It was standard terrain that all four of them knew like the back of their hands. An open area with long grass that went up past their waists for sparring matches bordered by forest on both sides. The grass made for good cover but made it difficult for Rin to tell where some of the wires’ anchors were placed. Two of them stretched all the way to the other side of the divide, buried in tree trunks. None of the wires had anchors on her side. Rin huffed, rustling the leaves of the bush in front of her. She’d have to go out in the open to free Kakashi. Lifting a finger to her lips, Rin nibbled on her thumb nail.

It didn’t matter if the mission were D-rank or S-rank, in any given mission the medic’s life took priority. Depending on the stakes and the team, the squad leader themselves took a backseat. Obito shone when on aggressive defense. Being an Uchiha, he attracted the enemy’s attention first. Nothing better to enemy shinobi than taking out an Uchiha young, before they could cause too many problems. Rin’s strength lay of course within her medical ninjutsu. Most of her studies focused on the healing aspects of medical ninjutsu, but she’d learned a thing or two from the offensive healers and could do heavy damage in close quarters. Rin ripped out a hangnail on her forefinger with her teeth and thumbed away the dot of blood. Kakashi was the quickest of them. He never hesitated. Kakashi didn’t so much plan things out as much as he adapted to whatever was thrown way.

Obito was like the team’s skin, the first line of defense, layered and flexible but tore when stretched too thin. Minato, when actually on their side, acted as both brain and skeleton, supporting and driving them towards survival. Rin was their blood, carrying oxygen and vital nutrients throughout the body. Kakashi was the luck that allowed any given shinobi to live past thirty. When pit against their own mind, the overwhelming force that was Minato-sensei, they needed Kakashi’s unpredictability. Minato-sensei had set a limit on his hiraishin use to two for the exercise. He’d used it once to trap Kakashi.

But what choice did she have? Rin fixed her gaze to her left where her biggest problem gracefully dodged relentless attacks. A quintet of Obito clones occupied Minato-sensei’s attention, chucking everything from cutting winds to dead leaves at him. If she got too close, he’d ditch Obito and come after her. If she actually managed to free him, he’d just grab Kakashi again and put him right back in the trap. If it came down to it, he’d prioritize keeping Kakashi out of the fight.

Again, Rin let out a frustrated huff as she considered what to do.

Another of Rin’s strengths was her chakra control. Five clones popped into existence. If going for the anchors was a bust either way, she’d might as well just go straight for Kakashi himself. She leveled her chakra between the clones, making them more durable and tougher to distinguish from the real her. Adding a condition of substitution on all six of her ate up a lot of her chakra. She had maybe two jutsu left. Muscles buzzing with a jutsu yet cast, Rin darted out from the underbrush while her clones made for the anchors.

She kept low to the ground.

Minato-sensei vanished in the blink of an eye. She heard one of her clones yelp. Rin sprinted. Apparently, she hadn’t made them durable enough. _Pop_. One good kick did one of them. She felt a phantom tingle in her ribs. _Pop. Pop_. Rin kept her focus. A wave of Obito clones leapt onto the scene, keeping Minato-sensei busy. Using an earth jutsu to launch herself into the air, she dove through a gap in the crisscrossing wires and landed in a roll.

She jumped to her feet.

The name of today’s exercise was Complimentary Freeze Tag and it was meant to strengthen the team bond.

“I like how you handle tough situations in creative ways,” she praised.

Every time they tagged a frozen teammate free, they had to exchange compliments.

Rin tapped Kakashi on the shoulder, unfreezing him.

He kicked at the dirt, huffing.

Remembering their first few weeks together as a team made her blush. Rin had tried everything short of cooking a bento box with a let’s be friends sticker slapped on the side of it to make him comfortable around her.

Kakashi muttered a compliment without making eye contact. “You are the most valuable person on this team.”

He summoned three clones plus Pakkun and sent them to aid her and Obito’s clones.

To her surprise, Minato wasn’t going all out on them, but they seemed to be putting up a good fight. The Obito clones and Rin clones teamed up while the Kakashi clones fired off range attacks. Rin sometimes forgot that shadow clones really were just a lightweight copy of yourself.

“I hate this exercise.”

Rin shrugged, grinning and out of breath. “Can’t you feel the team spirit?”

“Let’s go free Obito.”

They dispersed from the wire trap then set to finding the real Obito who had been frozen among the trees. While it was against the rules to cast a ninjutsu while frozen, it didn’t count if a clone was free and did the casting. Rin lost the remainder of her clones before they found him poking at an anthill with a stick in a small clearing. Kakashi tagged him free.

“If you try super hard sometimes,” Obito grumbled, knees popping as he stood, “like once in a blue moon, you can be funny.” He threw his hands up in the air as soon as he finished. “There! Tell Minato-sensei that I’ve competed my compliment quota for the day.”

“Your chakra control sucks ass but since you have a butt ton of chakra, I guess it doesn’t really matter that you waste half of it on stupid moves.”

Obito pushed his goggles up then nudged Rin with his elbow. “Say, Rin, did you hear that? Mark the time and date there’s something Kakashi can’t do after all.” He rustled in his pocket and pulled out his eyedrops. Dropping the medicine into his eyes, he drawled like anybody does when putting things near their eyes, “Give…an honest…compliment.”

He blinked away tears and fixed his goggles.

“There was nothing in the rules against backhanded compliments.”

“I’m pretty sure there was,” Rin said.

Kakashi gave her a _look_ , scandalized.

“You’re supposed to take my side.”

“What? I’m not taking sides –”

“Yes, you are. You did. Just now.”

“Wheatgrass head!” Obito snapped.

She and Kakashi exchanged confused looks.

“What?”

Obito pointed at Kakashi’s hair. “Since you want to be like that, that’s what I’m gonna call you since, y’know, your hair’s all spiky like a wheatgrass patch – Wheatgrass Head.”

“Fine!” Kakashi squawked. “You want a compliment? You’re good at talking and easy to trust. I’m sure they’ll put you on all the diplomatic missions. Clients like you. Even when they don’t like shinobi, they like _you_.”

Obito nodded then threw his arms around both their necks.

They made their way out of the forest like that.

Kakashi. Obito. Rin.


End file.
